My parents’ generation reached adulthood at a time when it was perfectly legal for women to be paid less than men for the same work.

It was also perfectly legal for many employers to force women out of their jobs as soon as the women got married .

Doesn't it seem incredible now that such blatant unfairness and discrimination could have been allowed exist for so long and until so recently? How could anyone have considered it right or fair?

The wrongness of it is so obvious to me and to most people in 2015 that it's hard to imagine how anyone could have rested until this discrimination was ended. Yet hundreds of thousands of nice, ordinary decent people went about their daily lives thinking this state of affairs was okay, or maybe not thinking much about it at all.

Thankfully, there were those women and men who engaged in battle to set things right.

It wasn't easy. They faced economic arguments from employers for whom equal pay would have big financial implications. They faced emotional arguments about how families would suffer as women were forced out of the home to work because men's pay would fall.

In the end though, those arguments couldn't stand up to the need to right a basic injustice. The equal pay legislation was introduced (with a bit of a nudge from Europe!), the marriage bar was lifted and, within a relatively short time, it became considered completely normal and completely right that women got paid the same as men for the same work.

We've now got the chance to right another injustice, to fix another inequality.

This time, it's about discrimination against same sex couples in the matter of marriage. In case you've been on another planet for the last while, LGBT couples who love each other and may or may not be raising children or hoping to do so in the future can not get married in Ireland the way most other couples, who happen to be in heterosexual relationships, can.

Citizens of voting age have the opportunity on May 22 to remove this inequality. Straight forward enough you'd think?

(Image: Getty)

Well not quite. Nothing is ever that simple when you try to change the status quo or remove an inequality that people have always lived with.

Just as campaigners faced a hard battle to get equal pay for women in Ireland in the early 1970s or achieve the legalisation of interracial marriage in the United States in the 1960s, so campaigners for marriage equality here face opposition now.

There are arguments by opponents suggesting marriage equality will somehow damage those families that are based on heterosexual marriage; that it will weaken the very concept of marriage; that it will be unfair to children; and that it's not 'natural'. There's also the one that it isn't necessary as gay people have civil partnership. (This last argument has been beautifully addressed by others during the campaign who point out that at the time, many wondered why Rosa Parkes made such a fuss about sitting up front on the bus when surely what was important was that she was allowed on the bus) in the first place).

For months, we've been hearing passionately-argued reasons from all side about why two men or two women in loving relationships should or should not be allowed marry each other.

But I think it's time to put these arguments aside and focus on the real issue. And that is that a large number of our citizens are being discriminated against. They are being denied the right to marry with all that that implies for the legal and social status of their families and relationships.

We have the chance to change that.

It doesn't matter if the outcome doesn't directly affect my life or the lives of most of you reading this. For some of you it's of enormous personal importance, because you, your children or grandchildren or friends don't have the right to get married and would like to.

What matters now for all of us is that we can end a particular form of discrimination and remove an inequality which is hurting so many people.

I'd like to think that in years to come, my children will wonder at how society could one have stood by while people were being discriminated against because they were gay. I'd like to be able to tell them how we changed that.